-
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.
C. S. Lewis
-
After an error you need not only to remove the causes but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an 'undoing' is required.
C. S. Lewis
-
Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer.... An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician
C. S. Lewis
-
No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly
C. S. Lewis
-
He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.
C. S. Lewis
-
If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will--that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings--then we may take it it is worth paying.
C. S. Lewis
-
There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them.
C. S. Lewis
-
Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.
C. S. Lewis
-
We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, 'God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full - there's nowhere for Him to put it.'
C. S. Lewis
-
Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.
C. S. Lewis
-
If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.
C. S. Lewis
-
But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.
C. S. Lewis
-
Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.
C. S. Lewis
-
It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.
C. S. Lewis
-
The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can't both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn't fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best will in the world, he will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction.
C. S. Lewis
-
''Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?''
C. S. Lewis
-
She stepped out from among their shifting confusion of lovely lights and shadows. A circle of grass, smooth as a lawn, met her eyes, with dark trees dancing all around it. And then --Oh Joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him.
C. S. Lewis
-
Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.
C. S. Lewis
-
if anyone present wishes to make me the subject of his wit, I am very much at his service--with my sword--whenever he has leisure.
C. S. Lewis
-
Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere "opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor.
C. S. Lewis
-
To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek Calends.
C. S. Lewis
-
Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
C. S. Lewis
-
There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.
C. S. Lewis
-
If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
C. S. Lewis
